NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470: 6 Months Late, Was It Worth the Wait?
by Ryan Smith on March 26, 2010 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Crysis: Warhead
It’s been over 2 years since the release of the original Crysis, and “but can it run Crysis?” is still a common question even today. With a mix of dense foliage, long draw distances, and high quality textures, Crysis is still a game that can bring any machine to its knees, and is our first choice for testing any video card.
As far as this first game is concerned, things are looking so-so for NVIDIA. For the GTX 480, it’s in a solid 10-12% lead over the 5870, and unsurprisingly losing to the 5970. For the GTX 470 things are less rosy; it basically is breaking even with the 5850. Furthermore there’s an interesting pattern in our averages: the gap between the GTX 400 series and the Radeon 5000 series shrinks with resolution. Keep an eye on this, it’s going to be a repeating pattern.
We’ve also gone ahead and recorded the minimum framerates for Crysis, as in our testing we’ve found the minimums to be very reliable. And in doing so, we have some data even more interesting than the averages. The GTX 400 series completely tramples the 5000 series when it comes to minimum framerates, far more than we would have expected. At 2560 Crysis is approaching a video RAM limitation in our 1GB and under cards, which gives the GTX 480 cards a clear lead at those resolutions. But even at lower resolutions where we’re not video RAM limited, the GTX 480 still enjoys a 33% lead in the minimum framerate, and the GTX 470 is well ahead of the 5850 and even slightly ahead of the 5870.
For whatever reason AMD can’t seem to keep up with NVIDIA when it comes to the minimum framerate, even at lower resolutions. Certainly it’s obvious when the 1GB cards are video RAM limited at 2560, but if we didn’t have this data we would have never guessed the minimum framerates were this different at lower resolutions.
Finally we have a quick look at SLI/CF performance. CF seems to exacerbate the video RAM limitations of the 5000 series, resulting in the GTX 480SLI coming in even farther ahead of the 5870CF. Even at lower resolutions SLI seems to be scaling better than CF.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
196 Comments
View All Comments
yacoub - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
I think he's got it right. If you want high yields, a larger chip size is the enemy, because you get fewer chips per die, and thus lower yields.Rebel44 - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
IMO HardOCP review was better because they showed real world differences between those Nv and AMD cards - 470 didnt allow better setting than 5850 and 480 was only little bit better than 5870. So 470 is IMO epic fail at that price.When you add extra power and noise fom 470 and 480, I wouldnt pay for them more than for 5850 and 5870.
stagen - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
With the 470 and 480 generating so much heat and noise, and consume more power than even the dual GPU Radeon HD 5970, even thinking of dual GPU 470/480 (495?) is a scary thing to do.yacoub - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
Agreed. And considering the $350 470 is no faster than a $150 5770 at 1680x in BF:BC2, and only 23% faster at 1920x, that's pathetic. Considering how much better it does in other games, it must be a driver optimization issue that hopefully can be worked out.mcnabney - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
Fermi has existed for months, so the driver work should be as far along as AMD. The delay allowed for better stepping and higher clocks, but the drivers aren't going to improve any more quickly than AMD.uibo - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
What was the ambient temperature?Ryan Smith - Saturday, March 27, 2010 - link
20C.mindbomb - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
Firmly in AMD's hands?i dont know about that.
Although it can't bitstream true hd and dts-MA, I would argue that's not really as debilitating as not being able to bitstream level 5.0 h264 video, since you can output as LCPM.
Galid - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
FIRMLY in AMD's hand...it is... not only Nvidia doesn't do true HD and dts-ma for a card that doesn't fit in a HTPC but they won't even when they get the smaller cards out... Firmly? yeah....mindbomb - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
let me be more clear.I'm saying although the ati cards have better handling of audio, the nvidia cards do in fact have better handling of video since they can handle level 5.0 and 5.1 h264 video (and i guess mpeg 4 asp, but thats irrelevant)
so i wouldn't say the ati cards have a definite lead in this area.